As South Africa welcomes local data centres from global players like Microsoft and Amazon, it’s clear that the cloud conversation is about to become more vocal.
The latest moves are driving more enterprises to consider public cloud services, says Kevin Krige, data centre and cloud service lead at BT in Africa. “Before, many argued that their cloud services were more relevant to SMEs. However, given Microsoft’s focus on macro enterprises and the fact that it has revised its licensing and procurement models, its relevance has become far more disruptive in the overall cloud adoption conversation.
Read the full story here
Case study: how Travelport uses cloud to meet digitalisation demands
By Mike Croucher – The travel industry is transforming with emerging technologies, new business models and changing consumer expectations.
Travelers now have a wide range of options when it comes to planning their trips. While it might have once been common to visit your local travel agent to plan a trip after seeing a neighbor’s vacation snaps, it’s now more likely that vacation pictures on social media are leading someone to browse for a getaway online. People can perform their own search and use a travel-booking website to compare the vast amount of options available.
Read the full story here
Six ways to optimise your cloud usage
Elaine Wang, cloud and software solutions director at Rectron, provides some tips for businesses looking to maximise their return on investment from the cloud
For the longest time, businesses have been involved in discussions around the benefits of shifting their data and applications to the cloud. But it’s increasingly apparent that the time for those conversations is over.
Read the full story here
Standard Bank partners with AWS for cloud migration
By Kathy Gibson – Standard Bank plans to migrate production workloads that include customer-facing systems and strategic core banking application to the cloud, and has signed up Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider.
Group CIO Alpheus Mangale believes Standard Bank could be the first financial institution in South Africa, if not Africa, to announce a cloud migration of such magnitude.
Read the full story here
Solving the challenges of multi-cloud storage
Statistics gathered from the Gartner Symposium held in Cape Town in September 2018, stated that 60% of South African organisations use cloud services today.
This percentage is expected to increase with the imminent roll out of local data centres by public cloud powerhouses, creating a ‘market’ where organisations will be able to choose between local or global public cloud and private cloud environments.
Read the full story here
First Distribution brings Microsoft Azure platform to market
Microsoft South Africa has officially opened its local data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, aimed at driving public cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and edge implementations across the African continent.
The two data centres have become part of a 54-region ecosystem that represents and multi-billion dollar investment. This means that customers can decide to keep their data locally, or use the platform to expand globally.
Read the full story here
As the hyper-scale cloud providers make massive investments in South Africa, opening their in-country data centres, they are prompting organisations to look for seriously at public cloud services to enhance their digital strategies.
It’s important that the hyperscale cloud providers are now operating in South Africa, says Abdul Moosa, chief technology officer of Fujitsu South Africa. “Prior to them investing locally, there was a lot of concern about data locality, data sovereignty, security and performance, all of which affected the adoption of cloud services.”
Read the full story here
Are we teetering on the edge?
For the past five years we’ve all been talking about the cloud. It’s become all pervasive as companies move to consumption-based pricing, and we’ve watched the meteoric rise of the hyper-scalers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. And that’s despite the cynic’s view that “the cloud is simply a data centre that nobody is supposed to know where it is”.
Currently, around 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralised data centre or cloud. By 2022, Gartner predicts this figure will reach 50%, with a great deal of interest in edge computing, where data is stored and processed very close to its point of consumption and/or creation; a factory, an oil rig, a retail outlet or even a container ship.
Read the full story here